


She-Wolf

by Psychoactive



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Altered Destiny, Dark Magic, F/F, F/M, Fight for Equal Rights, Werewolf Hermione Granger
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 21:10:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12093495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psychoactive/pseuds/Psychoactive
Summary: Harry Potter: "How come they like Voldemort?"Remus Lupin: "They think that, under his rule, they will have a better life."Fourteen years ago Voldemort boasted legions — not just witches and wizards but all manner of Dark creatures. The Ministry of Magic flew to disarray, the International Statute of Secrecy stretched thin. Emphasis remained on the safeguarding of magic; and dating back to the days of the Inquisition, the Wizarding Community had segregated itself. But meanwhile, the muggles were dying too. Every week there came news of more death, more disappearances, more torture. Categories began to blur: man, woman, prince, pauper, it mattered not; they were muggles all the same. Hapless dentists were caught in raids just as easily as teenagers, drinking obliviously as they were outside of McDonald's. Mr and Mrs Granger were no more expecting werewolves than those boys were.Werewolf Hermione; Dark Magic; Blood Politics; Oppression; Fight for Equal Rights; Altered Destinies.





	She-Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> _Warning: There is introduced an element of vampirism to this tale! While I respect that J.K.R didn’t want it to dwarf a story that was, fundamentally, about Witches and Wizards (and dwarf it by a tired mainstream trope, no less) I am doubtful as to whether this particular community would ignore a Wizarding War whose genocidal target is their very source of existence. In this tale, Hermione is a werewolf, and she’s never been shy of defending those squashed by a system - including those who might not want defending._  
>   
> 
>  **Butterfly Effect.,** _noun_ : In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
> 
>  **Lacuna.,** _noun_ : lacuna; plural noun: lacunae; plural noun: lacunas
> 
> 1.  
> an unfilled space; a gap.  
>  _"The journal has filled a lacuna in Middle Eastern studies."_  
>  Or: A missing portion in a book or manuscript.  
>   
> 2.  
> Anatomy  
> A cavity or depression, especially in bone.  
>  
> 
>  _M.O.M. Classification:_ "The Werewolf is found worldwide, though it is believed to have originated in northern Europe. There is no known cure, though recent developments in potion-making have to a great extent alleviated the worst symptoms. Once a month, at a full moon, the otherwise sane and normal wizard or Muggle afflicted transforms into a murderous beast. Almost uniquely among fantastic creatures, the Werewolf actively seeks humans in preference to any other kind of prey.”  
>   
>  **\- Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, p. 41-42**
> 
>  
> 
> _"Well, now that you understand what dreadful lives they lead, perhaps you'll be a bit more active in S.P.E.W!"_
> 
>  
> 
> _"Oh for heaven’s sake! Listen to me, all of you! You’ve got just as much right as wizards to be unhappy! You’ve got the right to wages and holidays and proper clothes, you don’t have to do everything you’re told."_
> 
>  
> 
> _"It’s people like you... who prop up rotten and unjust systems, just because they’re too lazy..."_  
>   
>  **— Hermione Granger**
> 
>  
> 
> _"It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be; it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are."_  
>   
>  **— Albus Dumbledore**  
> 

One minute you’re just a little girl, eight years old, sitting on the counter in the kitchen drinking overly-milky tea – the next you’re Mrs Granger, married and widowed, the stink of liver under your fingernails and the water in the shower running red around your feet.

In the thought experiment you commit suicide. _I wouldn’t do it. I’d kill myself._ In reality you don’t. In reality you kill and eat someone else. Every full moon. You start at one end of the experience, go through it, come out the other side. You’ve killed and eaten a human being, and what? Blood winks on your fingernails, mats the hair on your arms and snout. The moon sets. The next day you wake up in the sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is television. There is tea. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity. 

_I ate his heart._ It seems incredible that the words don’t refuse, don’t revolt. But why should they? _You_ didn’t. The werewolf did. 

There’s your horror, yes. But your horror is a tide going out: every wave stops a little further away. Eventually there’s just the sighing delta, the new you, the werewolf.

Naked, towelled dry, she stood in front of the full-length mirror. Stone-like breasts webbed with veins she’d never seen before. Belly as big as a cauldron. Navel sticking out like a lewd gesture. _It’s disgusting,_ her school friend had said once, of Mrs Huxley's enormous pregnancy. _She used to be pretty. Now she’s just this fat, shambling-_

It’s a terrible thing to see yourself start to cry, as Mrs Granger did just then. Not least because in spite of your misery there’s how funny your face looks. But here were the tears – dear _God_ – again, and the feeling of something big and obvious infuriatingly just out of view.

Halfway down the stairs her legs buckled. She grabbed the banister, slid to her knees and vomited. Bile and water, since she hadn’t had solid food in five days. 

It hadn’t always been this way. Mrs Granger swanned through the first eighteen weeks of pregnancy, symptom-free. Then, without warning, everything changed. Cramps, vomiting, night sweats, visual disturbances, nosebleeds, back ache, diarrhoea, breath-taking uterine pains.

Pregnancy and the "hunger" didn’t get along. Hated each other, in fact. She pictured the baby pressing its little wolf claws against her womb, five bits of broken glass on the skin of a balloon. 

Pain thickened under her toenails, warmed her eyeballs. Her own inner beast smirked and kicked and cajoled in her blood. _Come on, what’s a few hours between friends? Let me out._ Let me _out_. Every month the same delirious bullying. Mrs Granger closes her eyes.

Bad idea. The memory footage ran, immediately: of her old bedroom, the wardrobe door swinging open, its long mirror reflecting her husband on the floor, his body cinematically open, torn from gullet to groin. The mirror also introduced Mrs Granger to her new self in all its grotesque glory. Monster. Murderer. Mother-to-be.

By the time she’d made it downstairs the cramps were so bad she couldn’t make it to the settee. Her face was a neuralgic map. Her teeth chattered. She got down slowly onto her hands and knees and forehead. The thin Inupriat rug had a friendly smell of dust and patchouli and mould. Thanks to pain she’d rediscovered the humble rewards of lying down in unlikely places.

One by one the baby’s broken-glass nails withdrew. The pain furled shut, by degrees. Again, her own inner monster smiled, a prisoner’s smile - as if to the guard - knowing the breakout gang was already on its way. Transformation was close.

*****

Moments ago Mrs Granger hadn’t wanted this. Now she wanted nothing else. Same every month: you forgot the Curse was an exchange, took your speech and your mercy but gave you in return the planet’s dumb throb and your own share in it. Lilac shadows on the snow, the Forest of Dean whispering around her, the Eucharist moon and the land’s heart like a song calling her home. Mrs Granger was ready to transform - had, in fact, already begun the process.

Outside she stood, partly there (jaws open, tongue as thick as a baby’s arm, breath going up in signals of dreadful life) and knew something was wrong. Half a dozen trees back from the edge of the drive, and she couldn’t finish the last stages of her shift. 

She was stuck midway, an appalling freak biology show, her lungs expanding, threatening to burst against the ribs – but unable to actually _do_ it. Her spine elongated in three, four, five spasms and the claws detonated all at once. She felt twisted, torn, churned, throttled – but halted, paused, rushed through a blind sequence without a finale. 

Mrs Granger keened around her own tongue, expecting the muscular and skeletal wrongness to, in one elusive stroke, be put right. But it didn't.

She didn't understand - it had always righted itself before; this wasn’t her first shift, this thing was meant to have a way of sorting itself out. The last nine months taught her as much.

A thick canine hurried through. A shoulder blade popped, but nothing else. She stumbled, wheezing, brought a misshapen claw up to her warped skull and moaned in distress.

From the trees, a voice with an unusual accent said: “Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all.”

Mrs. Granger jumped. She hadn't heard the man approach (and _how?_ ) – but when she turned there was no one there.

For a moment she stood still, breath moist and warm around her muzzle.

Then her waters broke.

*****

As with all dreaded things, once it happened it felt inevitable. Of course she’d known it was a possibility. Simple math determined an approximately one in thirty chance that labour would coincide with a full moon. She’d prepared. She’d travelled with labour-inducing drugs: Pitocin, dinoprostone, misoprostol. She had (or would have had, if the consignment hadn’t been stuck in Cardiff) half a dozen amniohooks – little plastic crochet-needle type instruments used if the drugs didn’t work to rupture the amniotic sac – though the thought of having to resort to these terrified her.

The plan had been to wait until the thirty-sixth or –seventh week then make a decision: induce labour and risk slight prematurity or leave it and risk having to give birth… like this.

She looked down at the steaming splash her waters made in the snow. Fear ambushed her. A moment of blindness, before the world spun. She found she’d fallen to her monstrous knees and bent forward, elbow-deep in the snow. Her head was giant and wayward, too much for her neck. 

She crawled into the moonlight expecting its balm, but there was nothing. Just another contraction that doubled her over, lips curled, fists balled.

It took a long time to crawl back across the lodge’s threshold and into the safety of her family’s summer home. The stranger was a distant dream, unimportant by comparison, gone, meaningless. Pain rattled her bones.

 _'The amniotic sac ruptures either shortly before or at any time during the first stage of labour. The first stage of labour lasts on average 6-12 hours. The second stage of lab -'_ She screamed. Yelped, rather. All the times you’ve heard women talk about this pain it’s remained a mystery. Then one day it comes to you. Your version. The only version that matters.

She thought of her Aunt Margaret telling her mother about the thirty-hour labour she had for her cousin Ben: _"They kept telling me to pant like a dog, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I told the doctor why didn’t he try meowing like a cat."_

*****

Mrs. Granger ended up under the dining table, though she couldn’t tell you how she got there.

_‘Your bitch will seek a covered over or tucked away place to litter. She may ignore the whelping box, however comfortable you’ve made it, but this is normal. Let her follow her inclinations.’_

A great hoot for Lycanthropy doing away with any delusions of dignity her human self might have had. 

Somewhere between hotel reruns of _Friends_ and surreally perused prenatal magazines she’d gone to find canine health books in the local library, the tone of which alternated between pseudo-clinical and gratingly down-home:

 _'Mum will NOT thank you for bright lights and crowds on her big day, however much the children (and adults!) might want to watch. Give the little lady some PRIVACY.'_

Mrs. Granger had picked up the book in a moment of self-ridicule, and couldn’t have spent more than two minutes scanning its content, but it had gone in. Lycanthrope hard-wiring or a subconscious concession to her one-in-thirty chance of needing it. And now, here she was, needing it.

Another pain went through her, an effect like the sudden splintering thunder of a fighter jet overheat. _They kept telling me to pant like a dog. Like a dog. Ha ha-_

Push. Don’t push. Breathe. Pant. Push. Breathe. Don’t push. According to ' _Essentials_ ' there was a technique, a method. Mrs. Granger might have had it memorised once but she didn’t have it now. What she had now was a feeling of slowly splitting - starting between her legs - in half. 

(Plus irritation that there even was a method. What about the millions of women who’d had their babies without being told when to push and breathe and pant?) 

No position was bearable for long. She had to keep moving: all-fours; side; back; squatting. The contractions emptied her mind of everything, the way God must have felt before creation, when it was just Him on His own, without the angels or even Time going by. Between contractions was the terrible fact of her finiteness, the exact shape and size of the body that somehow had to accommodate all this.

 _'Mum will NOT thank you for bright lights.'_ This turned out to be true. 

The lodge ceiling had angled spots on its exposed beams and for some reason she’d left them all on. In the moments when Mrs. Granger wasn’t feeling her husband’s staggering absence, she was aware of them giving her a headache. 

Her claws scored the oak floor. Blood gossiped and thumped in her skull. Random details came and went in pointless vividness: the little brass logo on the patio door; the old black and white photograph; a small carved wooden otter on the mantle; her own too-big jacket, one thermal glove hanging out of its pocket.

 

She didn’t know how long it lasted. She pushed when her body demanded it. Once or twice tried not pushing. Couldn’t tell what effect it had, other than making her feel she was at the limit of what she could stand. She remembered putting her huge hands between her legs to try to feel how much she was dilated (vaguely thinking: four inches for humans - double it? Or not yet? What if I haven’t transformed down _there?_ Oh Gods -) but she couldn’t tell and her fingers came away wet with blood and in any case what was the point since she’d already started pushing? Mrs. Granger thought: All right, this is it. You die. _She died in childbirth._ Fittingly Victorian, for her family. 

Then the reality of potential death struck her - death right here, right now, actual death - and all Mrs Granger had besides pain was fear.

But she didn’t die. That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, and then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it. She knew how that worked. _Serves you right._ Monster. Murderer. Mother-to-be.

She wanted her husband. His ghost, even just a voice in her head, anything so she wouldn’t be feeling so alone. She didn’t want to do this alone.

Mrs Granger lay on her side, jaws clamped around one of the table legs. Her thighs felt sticky with blood. _'During the final stages of labour the uterine contractions are very strong and usually painful. The baby’s head presses on the pelvic floor, which causes the mother to have an overwhelming urge to push down.'_ In the gap before the final contraction Mrs. Granger heard someone moving around outside. Then it _was_ the last contraction, and with a sharp scalloping sensation (and a sound like a rubber glove being pulled off) the baby, in a knot of satiny gore, slithered out of her.

She felt exhausted. Her legs were negligible, two scraps of chiffon. In spite of which the imperative was simply to see the baby, verify its existence, establish it was breathing. With immense dull elephantine effort Mrs. Granger reached down and lifted her child towards herself.

It was a girl. Her eyes were closed and she was covered in mucous and blood. Distantly knowing that it wasn’t a baby, Mrs Granger licked the tiny muzzle all the same, blood-dazed, cleared the tender nose. The puppy coughed and wriggled closer. 

Mrs Granger knew this was only a moment but it felt pathetically intact, like a petal in a paper-weight, her own astonishment at the miniature canine paws and claws, the little nipples barely visible through the soft covering of gold and brown fur. The little thing opened its eyes. 

They were dark, unlike her own. Mrs. Granger thought: you walk around with it inside you and nothing prepares you for the absurd concreteness of the fact of it: a new creature suddenly here, disturbing its share of atoms. Mrs. Granger put her warped monster-hand under the little furry head and sensed flickery consciousness inside. The puppy blinked up at her, once, twice. 

For a moment all sound and movement ceased, as if someone had pressed a pause button on reality. Then her daughter sneezed and Mrs. Granger couldn't help the choked sob-laugh that escaped her, that put a vice around her heart, and she lowered her elongated snout to the girl's head to inhale. In that moment she couldn't care less if it wasn't human.

Her daughter’s head smelled the way puppies’ heads smell, which was one of those things that without warning refreshed or reloaded the fact that she was hers.

When she moved to ease the pins and needles in her left leg she felt something wet and pulpy between her thighs. _'The placenta is pushed out 5 to 15 minutes after delivery of the foetus.'_ Her daughter’s umbilical cord remained attached her to own – panic again – until she remembered that it didn’t matter: left alone the cord detached naturally. It was doctors who were in a hurry to get everything snipped off and tied up. _'There are no nerve endings in the umbilicus, therefore neither mother nor baby feels the cut.'_ Still, the thought of cutting it gave her a twinge. Her, who ripped people apart and ate them. _Serves you righ-_

As the infant looked at her with such mesmerising nude wide-awakeness she felt her own mind stumble. There was leisure to stare at her, leisure to consider everything so far. The emotional universe found room in that split-second for Mrs. Granger to feel her husband's absence, buried and dead before they'd even unpacked the wedding china. They'd been married two weeks before the attack, three days after their honeymoon. The thought of that year brings a feeling of exposure. He wanted a girl, though they weren't meant to pick favourites. The thought fractured something in her.

Mrs Granger adjusted her confused limbs, raised the child carefully to her breast. 

The physical sensation was shockingly literal, once the tough little anemone mouth found her nipple and latched on: a living creature sucking nourishment out of her body. ( _'Essentials'_ said milk proper might take three days to come in; meantime colostrum, the pre-lacteal secretion rammed with antibodies and who knew what lycanthropic extras.) 

Mrs. Granger went in and out of bearable horror - a six-pound parasite has attached itself to her - but also in and out of a feeling of pride, solar, overwhelming, unarguable with. Her head and legs were hot and everything had a confused edge. There was a tickle high in the back of her throat and the hard-boiled egg feeling of her eyes, as tears well.

*****

Vast mathematical silence and impenetrable darkness. Yes. For a while. But some perverse gravity had forced him back, to the cabin in the woods.

Moonset was a gap between twinkling land and roiling sky like a broken yolk of light. He shouldn't be here. Too close to dawn.

The visual puzzle of the woman-half-animal resolved itself only slowly, the confused mess of her limbs indicating a partial transformation. Werewolf, then. Was an interrupted shift even possible? 

The cub beneath the woman had its eyes closed against the flaring and subsiding light. It looked like a tiny ancient trying to recall something from long ago. Antares could feel the sun rising, pictured himself caught by daylight halfway to his nearest earth.

For a moment he watched the cub. It's terrible the way someone intently reading a book or tying their shoelace or tightening their eyes in their sleep as they dream - ambushes you with the whole weight of your tenderness. You surprise yourself. You surprise yourself, then realise even the surprise was a bit of a sham.

At these moments it was as if God said: _'See? There's a reason I put the soul in the body. The body is there for when the soul's language is no good.'_ But right then the body's language was no good either. The animal was dying. The effect of all the times he'd looked at something like this in hidden shocked fascination was still there. But now a detached version of Antares stood over it, like a mortician over a corpse. The cub wouldn’t live. It might as well be dead already.

Outside the forest was loud, now that he listened, with the sound of life's indefatigable plotting, the gossipy simmer of a new assault on his resolve.

Here it was, life's little compulsion to woo, the suitor who won't take no for an answer. Voldemort rising, Antares. Another chance for your kind. The future swelled with untenable richness. And now hereditary Lycanthropy; a werewolf born to a werewolf, and under full moon. What's that about? Stick around. Find out what happens next.

Yes, well. He knows what happens. _More_ happens. Variations on the same half dozen themes. There are only six plots, Hollywood says, or twelve, or nine... whatever the number it's finite, it's _small_.

His factions of thought quibble as he watches mother and cub, the confused mess of the adult’s limbs and her distorted jaw. She was a mess.

The big taboo – another species – broke negligibly in the end, and let him down to her level, shifting into a crouch, which was the sound that woke her. 

A silence of uncomfortable richness - for two seconds.

She opened her eyes.

Antares cleared his throat. "Hello," he said. "My blood is toxic to your condition." 

This by way of greeting. He had, he supposed, ruined the initial impression. 

Antares waited for her recognition. Oddly, it didn’t come. The werewolf continued to stare at him with gradually-wakening fear. Despite his long-absence from society (exist long enough and you develop an on-off relationship with catatonia) Antares did not recall their species having poor relations with the werewolves, not to elicit this level of fear. Though, he supposed, she had just given birth, and he was no ally.

"I cannot heal you, but your babe thrives. Where is your mate? Your - pack?"

She couldn’t answer. Antares realised she had her arms around her offspring to contain what looked like muscular spasms. Too much, too late. She blinked once, languidly, her initial shock giving way to something else. Her lips moved. One wet gobbet of her own raw meat winked red on her cheek. 

Antares paused, uncharacteristically lost for words.

Mossy green eyes flecked with gold. These eyes said: I’m going. She was past the old language: murder, morality, justice, guilt, punishment, revenge, whatever had led her to this condition and context, hiding out alone in the wild; it was no longer important. Those words were valueless currency on her voyage t come. 

Her eyes said: _So, this is it._

But his last question returned the smallest amount of awareness to her.

Antares said, “How would you have it known? Your child. What is its name?”

A few moments while the monster mother took this in.

"Hermione," she rasped, with the barest of smiles.

Then Mrs Granger saw through him and the matter of this world into final solving darkness - or perhaps annihilating light. Her eyes widened once, then closed.

Antares stared at the vacant body. 

Perhaps it was the life that shocked him, all gone, and so quickly; centuries since he’d considered the lifespan of a human – well, werewolf - let alone been so confronted by it. Antares waited until she’d fully cooled, partly out of respect, but partly to let the cub have its last moments with its mother. 

The puppy begun to keen, a high-pitched warbling sound. It struggled to keep out the invading cold. It's downy fur was wet. 

Antares gathered its mucky body out from beneath the mother’s bulk. 

He moved to leave the cabin, opened the front door. A cloud of snow shot in, swirled around his boots, meandered cold air through the wide-open door and ruffled the pages of some magazine in the hall. Outside the dawn gave the snow a yellow tint. _Too close._

Meanwhile the puppy stared at him like an emotionless deity. The brown eyes were wide open. She'd tensed against him as he’d lifted her, her instincts relaying threat, but soon enough she’d assimilated him. The small body relaxed. Now it was just a hungry infant again. He adjusted her awkwardly and stepped out.

In the new, still, science-fictionish light they could have been on another planet. Pine and silver birches, the stream glimmering like tinsel in the dawn.

It was on her skin too, as he glanced down at her. Gold everywhere, light on the short canine lashes, halo on the head. A soft oblong of deeper darkness fell behind them.

September and already it was snowing. The scene could have been an Eighties album cover, he thought idly, thinking of his overcoated silhouette and the odd-angled trees. The only discrepancy was the cub hitched to his chest. That, likely, would not feature in a typical muggle advertisement.

Antares didn't know why he did it - call it fate, call it a determined universe, call it what you will - but he decided to reach the werewolf colony, and soon - at this point, even a rogue pack might be more merciful to her than the cold - but the sun was cresting the horizon. Antares’ body wouldn't keep her alive through the hours, not with his temperature, and besides, did childer not need to feed? No matter how much blood he burned to mimic life, she would die. Sinking into day Torpor would strip him of the last of his warmth.

There was a separate frail rage that that mangled mother had done all that exhausting work of getting this child out safely into the world and now here the weather was, erasing it. It gave him a peculiar tender thrill of emptiness, leaving behind the corpse in that house.

"Well, then, Hermione," Antares murmured. His voice sounded odd, hung there in the air. But the pitiful whining stopped from under his coat. "Whether you are destined for this life or no, come the 'morrow, you’ll know." _I hope you like frozen corpse by blanket._

If she lived to next moonrise, he'd take her to the nearest colony.

But:

"For this day, try to survive.”


End file.
